A Pomo Childhood

Elsie Allen was born September 22, 1899, amid the neat rows of a hop field
outside what is now Santa Rosa, California. Her parents were George (of
the Ukiah Pomo) and Annie (of the Cloverdale Pomo) Comanche.
Allen's father died when she was just a girl; at age eight she went
to live with her maternal grandmother in the village of the Cloverdale
Pomo. This early phase of her life was idyllic. One website dedicated to
Allen's history painted a picture of a little girl who "made
dolls for herself of cattail grass … [and] gave bushes, trees [and]
willows names. They were persons and playmates in her imagination."

Pomo weaving skills were essentially matrilineal—passed down from
mother to daughter. Men wove fish traps, infant cradles and other
rudimentary items, but it was the female tribe members who raised the
skill to an art form, producing elegant and vibrant baskets that proved as
functional as they were beautiful. Allen learned basket-making basics from
her grandmother and her mother, spending her days steeped in the
traditions of her people and speaking only the native Pomo language.
Allen's mother, Annie, remarried a man of half-Pomo heritage named
Richard Burke and bore him a son and a daughter. After her mother
remarried, Allen moved with these new siblings to the village of the
Hopland Pomo, but by then the encroachment of white culture was actively
pushing the Pomo ways aside. Parents hid their children in fear of
abduction in the name of cultural assimilation when whites visited, and
most families, Allen's included, worked as laborers on farms owned
by non-Indians in order to survive.

Education

The days of innocent hunting and gathering had long since passed for the
Pomo, however, and Allen was no exception. She began working as a field
hand at the age of ten. At age 11 she was forced by authorities to attend
a boarding school for Indians in Covelo, California, more than 80 miles
from her home. The months that followed were some of the most miserable in
Allen's long life. The artist's biographical entry in
Notable Native Americans
explained how "her inability to speak English—the only
language spoken at the school—made life there very difficult. In
addition, soon after arriving in Covelo, Allen lost all her belongings in
a fire. Forced to wear boys' clothes, perform seemingly meaningless
activities, and abandon her native tongue, she had little incentive for
learning." Allen left the boarding school as soon as she was able
and returned home to attend a local day school in her village, where she
learned to read, write and speak English. At 18, Allen moved to San
Francisco and took a job as a domestic maid, a position in which she
experienced her share of racial discrimination. She worked her way into a
custodial job at St. Joseph's Hospital in 1918, thanks to a labor
shortage at the close of the World War I.

Trouble with Tradition

Allen married Arthur Allen of the Pinoleville Pomo tribe in 1919. They had
two girls and two boys. In 1924 Allen's grandmother died and the
family's baskets were buried with her according to Pomo tradition,
leaving Elsie Allen with few materials and samples to work from.
Allen's mother, however, continued weaving and used her own
determination and hard labor to build the family basket collection back up
throughout her own lifetime. A website that chronicled Allen's life
quoted Allen as she describes the frustration she experienced at the hands
of the Pomo burial traditions, "In the first few years of my
married life … I made a basket that was buried with my grandmother.
My next basket was buried with my great uncle. A third basket was passed
all around to relatives … [and was finally] buried with my
brother-in-law. I didn't have a good feeling about making baskets
after that."

Allen's disappointment was understandable, considering that most
baskets took years to make. Time had to be spent trudging through marsh
and muck to gather plant materials like willow, sedge roots, bulrush
roots, and redbud bark, and then more time was spent to cure and prepare
the materials. All this preparation was then followed by hours of weaving
that could stretch into months and even years before the work was
complete. To make matters even more difficult, by Allen's time the
plants used for traditional basket making were considered weeds, and often
aggressively eradicated by pesticides as the California land was
developed. As a result, weaving materials became increasingly scarce.

Pomo Weaving

The Pomo were one of California's biggest, most celebrated tribes,
with lands that spread across modern-day Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake
counties. The tribe's main foods were acorns and other seeds
gathered by women in baskets they wove according to a traditional method.
Baskets and weaving were essential to the Pomo, who did not have access to
clay for pottery. They made and used giant baskets on stilts to store
acorns, woven seed beaters to thrash seeds loose from wild grasses and
grains, and baskets with head straps to gather them. Acorn meal was mixed
and cooked using hot stones in water-tight baskets with exceptionally snug
weaves that allowed them to withstand both
the heat of the stones and the moisture. The men also hunted using fish
traps of woven willow. Even the houses were woven around bent pole frames
and were said to have looked like upside-down baskets. When they traveled
to gather food, they wove great mats that they attached to poles to create
temporary shelters. The woman's skirts were often made of woven
rushes or shredded bark, and they wove reeds to make rafts that they used
on the lakes and rivers for crossing and fishing.

Mary Worthylake's book
The Pomo
explained how "Pomo basket-makers were unusual in their use of
twining and coiling. The finest baskets, made for show or for gifts, were
coiled…. Thirty wrappings to an inch make a fine basket, but Pomo
baskets sometimes had sixty or even more wrappings. The variety of
patterns, the feathers and beads, and the fine workmanship show that Pomo
women were excellent artists." The Pomo also played a
game—later called
lacrosse
by French settlers—using sticks with baskets at the end for
catching and throwing a ball.

A Mother's Wish

When Allen's mother, Annie Burke, was on her deathbed she ignored
the fact that tradition insisted a Pomo woman be buried with the baskets
she had made, and demanded that Allen keep the family baskets so that Pomo
artistry would not die out. Allen's biographical entry in
Native American Women
stated that her mother promised that keeping and sharing the baskets
would "take Allen traveling, bring people enjoyment, and create an
understanding that the Pomo weren't 'dumb.'"
In 1962 Allen respected her mother's dying wish and loaned the
family baskets to the Mendocino County Museum in Willets, California. The
collection was named the "Elsie Allen Collection," and
displays 131 baskets made by Allen and her relatives.

A Woman Among Women

Pomo culture honored and respected female authority, traditionally placing
a female chief in charge of women's concerns. Allen maintained
aspects of this dynamic through her work in women's groups like the
Pomo Women's Club (founded in 1940 and disbanded in 1957), which
successfully fought prejudicial bans against Indians sitting on the main
floors of local theatres, and the Hintil Women's Club, which
dispensed charity and provided financial scholarships for local Native
individuals. Allen made and sold baskets to help raise funds for these
organizations, as well as lending her voice and valued opinion on
important matters.

Allen spent most of her life unable to find enough time to gather
materials or do a significant amount of weaving. She cared for her family
and remained socially active in the affairs and wellbeing of her people in
a time when racial prejudice was rampant in California. It was not unusual
for establishments to post signs declaring that dogs and Indians were not
allowed. When Allen turned 62, her children had grown and she was free to
return her attention and skills to basket weaving. She remembered her
mother's dying wish, and regularly demonstrated the traditional
Pomo weaving methods she had learned in her youth for substantial
audiences. Her book,
Pomo Basketmaking: A Supreme Art for the Weaver
, was published in 1972 and introduced a wide readership to the art of
Pomo basket weaving. Allen's book is described by reviewer Paula
Giese as "a Native woman's personal history woven into
… an art and a craft that is more in harmony with nature, more
environmentally-centered—because of its use of living
plants—than any other." Giese claimed that "The Pomo
basketmaker is, of necessity, a natural scientist, and the necessities of
the late 20th century force her to be an environmentalist too, if her art
is to survive."

As if in support of Giese's claim, Allen also spent three years
(1979–1981) as a valuable consultant to the Warm Springs Cultural
Resources Study, a Sonoma State University project with the goal of
detailing the history and cultures of the Dry Creek and Cloverdale Pomo
tribes. The reason behind the study lay in the U.S. Army Engineer
Corps' intention to build a dam at Warm Springs that would create
Lake Sonoma by flooding a valley in which a large majority of weaving
plants grew wild. Allen and other concerned experts were consulted about
the native plants in the area, and they succeeded in organizing a
re-planting of endangered plant species that would be destroyed by the
building of the dam. In a somewhat hollow victory, a fraction of the flora
was transplanted while the rest was drowned in 1985.

Her Legacy Lived On

Elsie Allen died on the December 31, 1990, at the age of 91. Her daughter,
Genevieve Allen Aguilar, maintains the family basket collection, honoring
her mother and grandmother's desire to make them available to
future generations from all cultures as a testament to Pomo artistry.
Allen's grand-niece, Susie Billy, apprenticed with Allen for years
to learn the art of Pomo weaving well enough to teach it to others and
continue the new tradition of passing the artistry and culture down to
future generations. A website chronicling the Allen basketmaking family
quoted Billy: "Through basketry, I feel I have made connections
with something very ancient within myself and from my people." The
work Allen did to maintain her cultural heritage was as important as her
own personal artistic contributions, and her dedication was rewarded with
the title of "Pomo Sage."